When Michael confronts Connie and Neri in the kitchen of his townhouse, he warns them to never give an order to kill someone again (in this case, it was Joey Zaza), and goes on to state that when he thought he had left the mob lifestyle, they pull him back.

As I reported last time, a bill in Arkansas, Senate Bill 653, pending in that state’s legislature’s Insurance & Commerce Committee since the beginning of March, proposes an alternative to the state system.

Ms. Beckman quotes Fred C. Bosse (not Fred C. Dobbs), the southwest region vice president of the American Insurance Association (AIA), who said that the bill is an attempt to keep the workers comp opt-out conversation going.

Mr. Bosse said that the AIA takes these bills seriously (good for them) and engages legislators to dissuade progress of such legislation the AIA believes could create an unequal benefit system for employees. (They haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid either)

Arkansas’ bill is the only legislation currently under consideration, but a state Rep in Florida, Cord Byrd (there’s a name for you), a Republican (it figures) from Jacksonville Beach, promoted legislation last year, but never filed it.

South Carolina and Tennessee, where bills were previously introduced within the past two years has gone nowhere.

And once again ARAWC rears its ugly head. For those of you unfamiliar with ARAWC, or the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation, it is a right-wing lobbying and legislation writing group based in Reston, Virginia. (see several other posts on ARAWC on this blog)

A statement ARAWC sent to BI said that these bills are beginning to pop up organically to model benefits that companies have seen from Texas’ non-subscription model. (Organically? That’s like saying mushroom clouds organically popped up over Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

Here’s a laugh for you, straight from the ARAWC statement:

“Outcomes and benefits for injured workers have improved, employers are more competitive when costs are contained and taxpayers are well served by market-driven solutions,” They further said, “We recognize that each state is different and that the discussions at the state level will involve varied opinions.”

Of course, we cannot really know if injured workers are benefitting, or just being denied their rights, and it seems that opt-out is only to help employers and taxpayers get out of their responsibility to those who sustain serious injuries while employed.

In another post, the notion that Texas’ system could serve as a model for other states was outlined in a report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (don’t you just love the names of these reactionary groups?)

Bill Minick, president of PartnerSource, praised the report, according to Ms. Beckman, and said that competition has driven down insurance premium rates and improved benefits for Texas workers. (That’s what he says, but is any of it true, I wonder? I doubt it.)

ARAWC has listed a laundry list of benefits they say responsible alternative comp laws could provide:

Better wage replacement

Reduced overall employer costs

Faster return to work

Fewer claims disputes (yeah, because they would be denied)

Faster claim payouts

Faster closure (well, when you deny claims, they can be closed faster, duh!)

It is good to know that the AIA is critical of the report, and that in their opinion, it is unworkable to allow employers to adopt a separate, but unequal system of employee benefits.

And as we have seen with the defeat of the AHCA, leaving a government-sponsored program up to market-driven forces is a recipe for disaster that should not be repeated in workers’ comp, no matter what flavor the Kool-Aid comes in.

Once again, we have to look at the issue of opt-out. This time in the land of Lincoln.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Abraham Lincoln

Yet, it seems that Capital is still trying to stick it to Labor by dismantling the workers’ comp state systems.

Stephanie Goldberg, writing yesterday in Business Insurance, reported that the Illinois Policy Institute, an organization the Republican Governor, Bruce Rauner, has previously donated to, issued a report last month calling for “updates” [Emphasis added] to the state’s more than 100-year-old system.

The author of the report and the director of the institute’s regulatory reform, Mark Adams, said in an phone interview that, “the system that is in place isn’t serving workers effectively.”

He acknowledged that it is difficult to reform the system because there are so many stakeholders (a point made by myself and others).

Yet, the report goes on to say that, “the most effective way for government to protect workers is not by a restrictive one-size-fits-all system, by by creating broad rules of the game that give workers more freedom to contract with employers for a deal that is better suited to their own situation.”

On the one hand, what the report is stating makes sense, and seems to agree with the idea of opening up the system to new ways of providing care to injured workers, but if we look deeper at the alleged success of opt-out in Texas, Oklahoma, and the failure to get it passed in Tennessee and South Carolina, we find that the proponents of opt-out have not been very up front and honest on the subject.

What they really want is to blow up the entire workers’ comp system nationwide, and take us back to before Triangle, a point they seem to be making quite successfully in some quarters of the work comp industry because of the apolitical and ahistorical atmosphere in which this issue is often discussed.

We recently lost one brave soul who fought the temptation to drink the kool-aid on opt-out, and we cannot let his memory pass without remembering that he was not fully convinced that opt-out had proved itself.

In my last post, I mentioned what happens to closed systems if they do not change. With opt-out, we would not be seeing an opening of the system that still offers protections to injured workers, albeit with more options and more flexibility, but rather a complete and utter destruction of the entire system, which is what ARAWC and the Illinois Policy Institute wants, so that the employer is the one who benefits, not the employee.

Mark Adams stated that the system they have looks like it deals with the 19th Century, and not with telecommuters, or people who balance caring for a child, an elderly relative, and work responsibilities. True, but going back to the 19th Century when workers had to sue for benefits, if they were lucky to get to court, is not the answer.

One reason why opt-out has not been successful outside of Texas and Oklahoma, is as Stephanie Goldberg, says, the potential for constitutional challenges to opt-out laws could give pause to states considering legislation, as what happened in February when the Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation Commission ruled that provisions of the state’s Employee Injury Benefit Act deprive workers of equal protection and access to the courts, and to unfairly allow employers to define “injury.” The Supreme Court in Oklahoma is reviewing the case.

One wonders what the old railsplitter would think about the idea to deprive Labor of its rights to equal protection and access to courts, and to benefits they deserve when injured on the job. Lincoln would be horrified to learn that Capital has become superior to Labor.

Now that my company has left from the weekend, and my recent job interview came and went (did not get the job), I want to catch up on two items from yesterday that caught my attention, and will impact the future of workers’ comp.

The first item comes from Joe Paduda.

Joe’s article, “What Job?” asks the question, “what job will injured workers return to?”, and states that many of the high-injury rate jobs that drive a lot of work comp premiums and services won’t exist in ten years, and a lot of low-injury rate jobs will disappear as well.

One industry that Joe sees as suffering jobs disappearing is the trucking industry, where the replacement of long-haul drivers with autonomous driving will leave many without employment. The trucking industry employs 3.5 million drivers and pays $40,000 a year.

Along with the loss of trucking jobs, are those jobs that depend on, and support the truckers and the trucking industry such as people who work at truck stops, wait staff, hotel staff, and mechanics.

To further the discussion, Tom Lynch, in Workers’ Comp Insider.com writes that artificial intelligence is going to bring change on a monumental scale.

According to Tom, “I suggest it is not hyperbole to predict that we are on the verge of an epochal change, something like a kind of mass extinction, and what’s going extinct is an enormous number of jobs. This change might be even more significant than humanity’s evolution from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

Tom mentions a report that Joe cites that suggests up to 47% of jobs run the risk of going the way of the Woolly Mammoth by 2025.

It is highly controversial and its conclusions have been hotly debated.

Even so, Tom says that the most conservative naysayers agree that the figure is at least 16% (but that figure doesn’t take into account the jobs that the AI revolution will create, estimated at about 9%, for a net job loss of 7%).

Stephanie reported that the Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation Commission unanimously ruled that the state’s opt-out law is unconstitutional.

The commission ruled that provisions of the Oklahoma Employee lnjury Benefit Act are “inoperable,” unconstitutionally depriving injured workers of equal protection and access to the court, according to Ms. Goldberg.

The ruling is immediately appealable to the state’s Supreme Court, so if they uphold the ruling, it would leave Texas as the one and only state with an opt-out option. Tennessee has not voted on the law this year.

From the ‘What’s happening now in workers’ comp’ department comes two articles written earlier this month by Jacquelyn Connelly in Independent Agent magazine.

The first, written on February 1, talks about new health care trends driving change for workers’ comp. The second, written a week later, deals with the top three regulatory issues to watch for in workers’ comp in 2016.

Let’s start with the first article.

As Ms. Connelly writes, medical now represents on average, 60% of the benefit dollar paid to injured workers, according to Peter Burton, senior division executive for state relations at NCCI (National Council on Compensation Insurance).

Burton said that, “if you went back 25 years ago, it would have been about 40%,” and he went on to say that, “medical is the largest component in most states of the benefit given to injured workers. If you looked at the amount of legislative pricing requested of NCCI during last year, the majority of the requests were medical-related.”

In my White Paper, I cited that “medical costs in 2008 were 58% of all total claims.”

One explanation Ms. Connelly gives is rising and shifting medical costs. According to Donna Urben, vice president and workers’ compensation product manager at Erie Insurance, “the rise in medical costs, we’ve all seen it on typical health plans and we’ve also seen it on workers’ comp.” She goes further to say that, “what helps with the control of the increase in medical costs are those states that actually are able to direct medical care.”

Some state workers’ comp laws state that injured workers must go to panel physician established by the employer for a timeframe that is mandated by state guidelines, according to Ms. Urben.

“If the injured workers receives medical care that fits the injury,” says Ms. Urben, “that ultimately gets them back to pre-injury status and enables them to return to work more quickly,”…”this explains why in some states that permit direction of care, employers are able to see a reduction in the claim cost on the medical claims side, versus those states that don’t permit direction of care, employers see a greater volatility in the medical costs from a workers’ compensation claim.”

Another reason given by Ms. Connelly for the rise of medical costs is the duration of treatment.

Medical costs could also transform under the ACA, says Yvonne Hobson, vice president of corporate underwriting at Amerisure, and could cause some cost-shifting in workers’ comp insurance, by authorizing the use of capitation models that designate a set amount for each enrolled plan member, regardless of whether they take medical during that time.

This is not the first time we have seen this issue of cost-shifting and the ACA come up, as I and others have written about it last year.

Hobson explains that, “there are some injuries, such as soft tissue injures or back or knee or shoulder pain, where the cause of the injury isn’t readily apparent if it happened on the job or outside of work.” There is some discretion on the part of the doctors, Ms. Hobson states, when determining if the injury is work-related or not.

On the other hand, Matt Lyon, of Foremost Insurance Group, cited some predictions that the ACA could reduce the frequency of “Monday morning claims”, where someone gets hurt on the weekend, they don’t have health insurance, and come into work on Monday and file a workers’ comp claim, Ms. Connelly writes.

Mr. Lyon noted that some preliminary studies suggest a slight correlation between the ACA and a decline in fraudulent comp claims.

Ms. Hobson concurs, and stated that, “the challenge with cost-shifting is that the research and the data on it is new, so only time is going to be able to tell us how it’s going to ultimately be impacting workers’ compensation costs.”

The final trend, Ms. Connelly mentions is the misuse and abuse of opioids and medical marijuana. I have discussed the opioid abuse issue before, so I will not go into that here, and the other trend is medical marijuana, as well as recreational use.

States such as Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington have allowed recreational use, and 23 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized medical marijuana.

In her second article, Ms. Connelly identifies three regulatory issues. These issues are:

Opt-out laws. Currently, as I have written about, opt-out is only in Texas and Oklahoma, but it was reported recently that the legislation in Tennessee has not passed this year, and maybe voted on again next year. Other states proposed for this legislation are Arkansas, North and South Carolina and West Virginia. The group behind the writing of this legislation is called “A-rock” (ARAWC).

Reform efforts. Peter Burton, cited by Ms. Connelly in the last article, said that insurance agents need to be wary of the “attack on the exclusive remedy”. I have also written about this; yet, my research for this article has found that the ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), a right-wing, non-profit organization partly funded by the Castor and Pollux of right-wing, libertarianism, the Koch Brothers has drawn up a bill defending exclusive remedy, which I find puzzling, because I would have thought that they would want to let workers try to sue their employers, which is what happened before the enactment of workers’ comp laws.

For workers’ comp, it means that there are challenges ahead that the industry needs to be aware of, but it also means that business as usual will no longer suffice, nor will doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results.

As we have seen in Ms. Connelly’s first article, medical costs are rising for workers’ comp claims. She does not mention whether or not this includes expensive surgeries, or is just confined to the immediate treatment of the injury and the subsequent process of returning the injured worker to their pre-injury state.

Some employers have seen reductions in medical costs, but overall, the medical costs keep rising, as evidenced by my White Paper that stated that in 2008, the percentage was 58%. Two percentage points in seven years.

Obviously, something or some things are not working. But as long as the industry ignores alternatives, as long as some people suggest that judges won’t order surgery out of the country (do doctors order executions, I wonder?), as long as these same individuals believe that no injured workers (especially Latino workers) will want to or will accept going abroad for surgery, and as long as the “old men” of the industry cling to xenophobia, racism and American Exceptionalism, holding back the workers’ compensation industry from joining the globalization of health care, comp included, then nothing will change, and costs will continue to rise.

Lastly, it is state laws themselves that need to be changed, modified or outright discarded so that employers across the country can realize huge cost savings in their medical claim costs, when their employees need surgery.

To say this will never happen is like saying Man will never fly, go to the Moon, or any of a thousand other “impossible” things we humans have accomplished. Are you saying that going to the Moon or flying is easier than going to another country to get surgery? Or are you just being xenophobic, racist, and delusional that American health care is the best?

You decide, but while you do, the meter is running on medical costs, and the other issues, such as opt-out, reform and job classification are making workers’ comp challenging now and for the future. But it does not have to be that way.

David Fish wrote an opinion piece last week in The Leaf-Chronicle that stated there is no need to change that state’s workers’ comp program, as had been discussed previously by numerous bloggers, including yours truly, and that ARAWC has been advocating, by actually writing the legislation for Tennessee and South Carolina.

It is such an excellent article, and makes the point so clearly, that I am going to let David Fish speak for himself.

Quotes

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

– Muhammad Ali

“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small..”

– Azim Premji

“Those who say your dreams are ridiculous have given up on theirs.”

– Unknown

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

– Thomas Carlyle

“As the work is done for the employer, and therefore ultimately for the public, it is a bitter injustice that it should be the wage-worker himself and his wife and children who bear the whole penalty.”

– President Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing.

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1908

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith

“Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges… which are employed altogether for their benefit.”

– Andrew Jackson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

– Abraham Lincoln

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

– Karl Marx

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, NOT on fighting the old, but on BUILDING the NEW.”

– Socrates

“Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

– Winston Churchill

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

– Robin Williams

“There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

– John Stuart Mill

“The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health [care] is the most shocking and inhuman[e]…”